The Boppers

Pymp-D’ahdee would not be who he is if he had been content to stop there. For one thing he suffered from the very problem his research was dedicated to solving. He had a world of vat grown slaves, he had servitors applenty and now even a non-trivial cybnertica cohort. Oh the wonderful things they could do when subject to his whim! But the problem was that when not subject to his whim they did very little at all. All these various types of servant were very poor at independent thought. The procedures that had made them immune to defiance had achieved this by just generally making them bad at conceiving of alternatives to the status quo and forming desires thereabout. While at first playing the role of Chief Apparatchik for global sized economy to command had been amusing to Pymp-D’ahdee he soon grew bored by the relative simplicity of the coordination problem and wanted to get back to his more challenging research. So it was he left Mávrigáta in charge of Agreste's production schedule and, under the cover of a roaming trade mission, left Agreste to search the Segmentum for a solution to this problem.

It was on the Hive World of Lavantia that Pymp-D’ahdee found his solution. A hive gang, the Boppers, had been arrested en masse and were due for converstion into servitors. Their crime had been attempting to prevent a member of a hated rival gang (The Motive Murderers) from undertaking the trials to become a Night Sword. When their leader had been caught in the act he had refused to give up any co-conspirators, and likewise no-one of their members had been willing to give anyone else up. So with the sort of justice that makes the Imperium proud the solution had been to just convert all known associates to servitors and let the Emperor determine who was truly guilty once they reached the golden throne.

Even faced with this outcome the Boppers refused to break ranks, and the fanatical loyalty this displayed impressed Pymp-D’ahdee. Looking into their records a bit more he found they had been competent narcotic smugglers and hit men, running some protection rackets with reasonable efficiency (more than the average Hive Gang, though that hardly says much) to keep a steady flow of income and other gangs off their back. They had even dabbled in inter-system smuggling with contacts in void ports in nearby systems beyond Laventine.

What was best -- they were poor. The riches and most powerful among them could afford somewhat decent apparel and the occasional excursion gambling and visiting the joygirls on some lower mid-tier hab. More typically they lived in the poluted darkness of the lower habs, evading detection for their smuggling thereby but suffering all the miseries this brought with it. Perfect! Their gratitude and compliance coudl be incredibly cheaply bought!

So it was Pymp-D’ahdee pulled some strings to have the entire gang handed over to him. He told the Lavantian authorities that this was to perform experimental servitor procedures on them. (This was met with a shrug by authorities who could not care less so long as they were gone.) But in fact once he had them on board his ship and out system he revealed to the Boppers that he had seen their potential and in exchange for total obedience was willing to enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with them. Many got to their knees and wept as they swore eternal gratitude to him.

So it came to be the factory foremen, officer corp of Agreste’s PdF, and commanders of all ships under his command are drawn from a Lavantian hive gang, The Boppers. He also provides legal and diplomatic cover along with material aid for their now massively extended smuggling operations. In exchange not only are they a totally loyal corp of thugs willing to do his bidding and run his operations, but their extended criminal operation serves as a pan-galactic personal spy network. (Of course their scope is not seriously pan-galactic, but they are present in multiple systems and now with the Magos' ships at their disposal even beyond the Segementum Tempestus.)

For their part the Boppers enjoy the new found legitimacy and widened scope, and on Agreste they even have their pickings of prime hab dwellings sufficiently high up to avoid the smog. Many of them have started to affect a kind of piety, heralding the Magos as a new prophet of the Omnissiah. The religious affectation is actually largely just for intimidation, since other Imperial citizens tend to find indications of anything even nearly blasphemous to be incredibly shocking... but the Magos isn’t complaining.

So now the Magos has not only his own forgeworld, armies of slaves and cyborgs, patented creations and the esteem of the entire Mechanicus, but an interstellar criminal organisation at his beck and call. His was a shadow empire with the Imperium, he could do what he wanted when he wanted where he wanted.